Chapter Three #3
Her heart skipped a few beats, then sped up, the way it had when he’d shown her this side of himself the first time. So many years ago, she’d thought she was having a heart attack. She’d wondered if losing him might actually kill her.
Now she knew there were much worse things than dying of a broken heart, and one of them was living with it. Another was marrying the man who’d broken it. Repeatedly.
Survival meant she’d learned how to ignore her heart when it beat like this, so she could soothe it when she was alone.
“And what exactly will you do?” Esme waved a languid hand, the very picture of someone completely unbothered by this.
By him. “Will you march your pregnant wife, your queen and the mother of your heir, down into the dank recesses of your dungeon? However will that play in the press, Tadeo? Do you think it’s possible that an out-of-control, raging king who’s decided a pregnant woman is the enemy might finally be more scandalous than a very boring story about a woman who wanted extramarital—”
“Do not bring up my mother,” he growled.
But Esme had long since decided that the much-maligned Queen Marisol was not an off-limits topic.
She had decided that Tadeo could not use his mother as an excuse for everything he did and then refuse to hear her mentioned in return.
Not that she had found many opportunities to put this decision into practice.
There was no time like the present.
She leaned forward. “Do you think it will work?”
His eyes glittered. It was obvious that he didn’t want to answer the question.
“Will what work?” he asked, as if it made his jaw hurt to get the words out. She hoped it did.
“Do you think that your perfect, anodyne heiress will wash away your mother’s grievous sins at last? Or do you just not wish to be reminded of them when you sit in a private room with another woman who dares speak her own mind?”
She didn’t expect him to move. Maybe he didn’t expect to move himself.
But one moment she was sitting in the seat opposite him, and the next, he was there. He braced himself above her, caging her in place with one arm on either side of her as his hands gripped the arms of the chair.
“How many warnings do you think I am going to give you?” he demanded, his face—his outrageously perfect face—far too close to hers.
“You don’t want to feel anything,” Esme said, tipping her head back so she could truly look him in the eye.
“You take it as a personal failing when you have a stray emotion. I can’t help you with that.
I don’t want to help you with that. But I do think, Tadeo, that you might want to consider the fact that fatherhood is not an unemotional state.
Your child is not likely to respect your boundaries. ”
“Not with you to teach him he shouldn’t,” Tadeo gritted out.
“Do you think the babies you might have with your perfect windup doll of a queen would be any better?” Esme asked and she laughed a little, right there in his face.
It had gotten easier over the years—or so she told herself—to ignore how beautiful this man was.
But it was not easy now, with his face so close to hers.
Not when she could remember kissing him months instead of years ago.
Putting her hands on his jaw, pressing her lips to his, indulging herself in him the way she hadn’t in so very, very long…
“I think everything would be better with the woman who was less…” He shook his head, eyes glittering. “With a woman who was not you, Esme.”
“But the woman you described would never suit you,” she said, and she laughed again. He didn’t need to know that it felt like glass broken into pieces in her mouth. “I don’t know why you’re pretending otherwise.”
“I think any man dreams of peace, king or not.” She could smell the faint hint of that scent he always wore.
The scent she had always found maddening, overwhelming, addictive.
It was something that reminded her of wood smoke with a brighter note beneath.
Pine, perhaps. Rosemary. “You wouldn’t understand. ”
“But I do,” Esme said. “It’s never going to happen.” She lifted a brow, and kept her gaze trained on his. “You like fucking too much for your little saint, my love.”
His eyes flared. And she’d used all of those words deliberately. Fucking, to get his attention. My love, to remind of the thing he wanted to remember least.
She didn’t see any reason why he should get to forget the thing she couldn’t help but remember, like it or not. Especially when he was the one who took that love they’d shared and shattered it.
How could he have told her he loved her—again and again—and then act as if she’d made that up in her head? She would never know. She only knew that he’d done it.
He’d done it. Brutally. And she had been living with it ever since.
Esme could see the way he sucked in a breath and she leaned forward, her chin high and defiant.
“You like to deny yourself like a monk or indulge yourself in me, but I doubt you’ve admitted the truth to yourself yet.
That no matter what, it’s not going away.
It’s still me. It’s always going to be me. ”
She could see the way his hands clenched hard on the chair’s arms, and kept going.
“You hold yourself back, you capitulate, it’s all the same.
What you have never known, nor ever will, I fear, is peace.
Exchanging me for a more biddable model won’t help you.
Because I will still exist.” She angled herself toward him, letting the intensity between them lead.
“So unless you’re going to kill me? I’m afraid, Your Royal Majesty, that you’re stuck. ”
“Damn you,” he growled at her, but then he made it worse.
Or better, depending, Esme thought in a rush.
Because he crashed his mouth to hers.